Editorial: A nation turns its lonely eyes to Uncle Herschel

The Editorial Board, Chicago Tribune on Sep 2, 2025

Published in Op Eds

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Corporate marketing has gotten considerably more challenging in the culture-war era.

Julie Felss Masino, the embattled CEO of Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, found that out the hard way when she rolled out a new, more modernized logo, ditching the familiar old man — we’ll admit we didn’t know he had a name (“Uncle Herschel”) until the recent blowup — leaning against the barrel that had graced Cracker Barrel’s signage for ages.

When the culture warriors on America’s right discovered the plan to replace Uncle Herschel with a logo emblazoned simply with Cracker Barrel’s name in a slightly adjusted font (but with the same colors), they manned the barricades. Christopher Rufo, unofficial woke-ism policeman of the Trump 2.0 era, called for the “breaking” of “the Barrel.”

In a post on X, Rufo said Cracker Barrel itself wasn’t what was important in this effort. It was to make clear to corporate America that if you “go woke, then “watch your stock price drop 20 percent.”

Has Rufo ever set foot in a Cracker Barrel? It’s worth asking. For our part, we have. It wasn’t the worst restaurant meal we’ve had by a long shot, and the atmosphere felt like an experience one might have had while traveling by car in America in the era before rest areas and interstate oases. Nostalgia, in other words, is more or less what Cracker Barrel has been selling.

Masino wanted understandably to appeal to a new generation of customers.

We in the journalism business — appealing to “younger” readers is our white whale after all — can sympathize.

But you are who you are, whether you’re Cracker Barrel or legacy media. With or without the attacks from the culture warriors, the soulless new logo along with the updating of Cracker Barrel restaurants to make them look more sleek and modernistic was a marketing misstep in our view. The first rule of a branding refresh is not to turn off your core clientele.

It came as no surprise, then, that Cracker Barrel, after a few days of hopeless and hapless insistence that customers actually liked the new look, faced up to reality and agreed Tuesday to at least bring back the old logo, especially after President Donald Trump, who views himself as the nation’s anti-woke policeman-in-chief, weighed in on behalf of Uncle Herschel. In fact, Trump provided some decent marketing advice: “They got a Billion Dollars worth of free publicity if they play their cards right,” he posted.

So the culture warriors can declare victory, and surely they did make a difference in l’affaire Cracker Barrel. But at the end of the day, it’s a roadside restaurant chain we’re talking about. Our national identity doesn’t rise or fall on Cracker Barrel and Uncle Herschel, who in our imaginations would be embarrassed and chagrined at all the attention.

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